Jit-Ogre is a Jitter external which embeds the functionality of the open source Ogre3D rendering engine, and exposes it to the Max environment. This enables you to export models from several 3D modeling applications, with textures/materials and animations, and render and control them with Jitter.

Requirements

On the Mac, jit-ogre requires an Intel CPU and OS X 10.5 or higher. It also requires an ATI or Nvidia GPU (although some integrated GPUs will still work).

The windows version has been tested with Windows 7, but there’s no reason that XP and Vista won’t work fine.

Both OS versions are made to work with Max 5. Older universal builds (for PPC or OS X less than 10.5) and Max 4 versions for the Mac are also linked at the left of this page.

Exporting

In order to export your files from your favorite 3D modeler for use with the jit-ogre external, you first need to find a suitable exporter.

The Ogre Tools page is a good place to start.

If you use 3DS Max, Maya, and Softimage/XSI on Windows, you are strongly encouraged to use the OgreMax exporter.

If you are using Maya on the Mac, you should download one of the exporters linked on the left of this page. If your version of Maya is not listed, contact me at support@jitogre.org

How do i do it?

All you need to know to use jit-ogre is in the help file. Functionality for the external is exposed through “behaviors”. The currently implemented behaviors are:

1. •Animation - Exposes control of exported animations
   

2. •Manual Bone - Allows for manually transforming a mesh’s skeleton
   

3. •Jitter Texture - Allows for texturing a mesh with a jit.gl.texture
   

4. •Ogre Shader - Exposes an ogre material’s shader parameters to Max
   

Each behavior has several messages that allow for exchanging data between Ogre and Max. The help patch shows how to query the available behaviors and their messages.

For more information, please see the instructional videos in the Videos page linked above.

Notes

Some extra stuff you might want to know.

The instructional video left out one step for Mac installation. You must also copy the freetype.framework and zzip.framework files into the /Library/Frameworks folder.

Windows installation is very similar to Mac installation, but instead of dealing with Frameworks, you have DLL files. Jit-ogre requires four DLL files, and they should all be placed in the Max 5 application folder (along with the ogre folder).

The OgreXMLConverter is a utility that can convert from binary .mesh and .skeleton formats to XML formats, allowing you to edit your mesh and skeleton files if desired.

There are two attributes not covered in the help file or the videos: aabb and boundingbox. Both of these attributes are related to a property of ogre meshes that is known as the Axis-Aligned-Bounding-Box. OGRE uses this value to determine if the mesh is visible. Usually the exporter will provide a correct AABB, that encloses the entire mesh (including it’s animations), but occasionally this is not the case, and you will need to set this value manually. If you send boundingbox 1 jit-ogre will draw the outline of the AABB, which should completely enclose your mesh. If it does not, you can provide 6 values to the aabb attribute to modify the bounding box. The first 3 arguments specify a point in 3D space that is the minimum extent of the bounding box, and the last 3 are the maximum extent.